Tuesday, August 12, 2014

Dan Guerrero / Blog 09 / Paul Thek

Paul Thek was
an American-born conceptual artist who worked in many different mediums as a
sculptor, painter and installation artist from the mid 1950’s to the mid 1980’s
ending with his premature death in 1988. A common theme running through his
work is the use of perishable materials, and as a result, a substantial amount
of his work no longer exists. What’s curious about this is that his pieces
referencing meat and its lack of permanence are his most enduring and finely
crafted pieces. Thek’s
career had many ups and downs, successes and failures, but his current
perceived status as art renegade and a 2010 retrospective at
the Whitney Museum speak to his influence and enduring popularity.

During
the summer of 1963, Paul Thek and
the photographer Peter Hujar
visited the Capuchin catacombs near Palermo Italy. In the catacombs are human
remains displayed in glass boxes, and it was this visual experience that would
inform Thek’s work
for the next few years. His work features slabs of meat, sections of an arm,
bound foot-like artifacts, all glistening meaty fat and oozing marrow. Some
with tubing penetrating thesurface of the meat
and others
with
hair that appears to be growing on the surface, the works are both alive and dead at
the same time. As real as they appear to be, they are actually skillfully
rendered sculptures made of plaster, wax, and hair. Thek was
trying to elicit an emotional response through these works, and in that aspect
they are truly successful. There is a real preciousness and attention to detail
that is oddly detached from the other art being produced at the time, which was
primarily geometric and minimalist.